With the development of the Internet technologies, two devices in a network can share resources through data transmission. In certain applications, data may need to be copied from a source device to multiple destination devices. In a commonly used method, a source device where the source data is located copies the source data to a plurality of destination devices one by one. Such a method is inconvenient to implement, and may also occupy the bandwidth between a source device and a destination device during a copy operation between the two. Particularly in situations where the destination devices and the source device are located in different network sections and the destination devices are located in the same network section, such a copy method apparently wastes valuable inter-network bandwidth resources between different network sections.
Presently, the peer-to-peer (P2P) or node-to-node technology is a popular data transmission technique. In P2P, at the same time of receiving data a device may also transmit the received data to other devices. The bandwidth available between the destination devices that are otherwise idle can thus be used. When P2P is employed in the above scenario, the intra-network bandwidth available between the destination devices can be used effectively, potentially reducing the amount of data transmission on the inter-network bandwidth between different network sections and saving the inter-network bandwidth resources.
A number of issues remain in existing P2P technology. In the currently P2P applications, each device typically can only control sending from and receiving data to itself (e.g., controlling the sending, rate and the receiving rate, and the number of destination devices, etc.), and a unitary control for data transmission of an entire network typically cannot be achieved at a single device using the transmission mechanism of P2P. When the amount of data transmission is too large, it may overwhelm and paralyze the network.
In the above-described application scenario where a source device needs to copy data to multiple destination devices and the data transmission is initiated by the source device, when a change occurs in the amount of the data transmission and/or the number of the destination devices, the current P2P technology typically cannot implement a unitary control on a single source device (or on a certain destination device) for the data transmission of the whole network, since the destination devices may only receive data passively.